﻿Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both published by Story Line Press. A collection of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, just published by Prolific Press (available at Amazon). Other poems in print and online journals. Adjunct professor creative writing George Washington University.

Je Ne Regrette RienI was nuts for her, orit was loneliness: left journalist,my short dark type,sardonic, superinformed, fragilesomewhere? When I saw heryears later, she was with(at a museum) someone big, needy,choleric, badly-dressedlike me, only worse.There are ghost slogans: You’ve got tolay your body on the wheels andgears … orThe interest is goodbut they’ll kill you on points … Ghostsbegin, that is, to quote these, thengiggle. There goes the neighborhood.Of course I respect you.Dare to struggle, dare to win.

He stares into Central Parkfrom some twentieth floor,and it is only my fancythat stills him;in realityhe is always being called, or calling ...Paper profits,but his rise and rise.Then he repositions himself,and he is always wise.From his vantage, absently, he seespeople disappearing under trees,green or bare, in the seasons of love and(what else?) commerce.He does no willful harm,would in fact like to charmeach passerby;and if harm must be done,relies on a powerhe approaches asymptotically.

Till among his trophied shelvesand certificateshe thinks of the voidhe senses, proudof that sensitivity(it would disintegrate if shown to many);ponders the energythat goes into evadingthat nothing,like the fury paradoxically spunfrom black holes.I know that vacuum too, its name is money.

That Briefer GarlandRemember how you were supposed to meetthat girl, name long forgotten, at a café,which, when you arrived, was crowded,and you sat watching for hertwenty minutes before you realizedshe was there, head down and reading,hidden by others, fifty feet away,signifying how little the evening meantto her, and how it would gofor you before you were alone again,but you walked over to her anyway?

All your problems thenwere petty in both senses,evasionsof real ones, and intolerableto people, who inventedvalues to deflect themthe way girls remembered boyfriends.Consider: you might haveenjoyed being youngmore than any winner,which would explain the rigor of this process.

So that walking home, you inventeda kind of age that wasn'treal age, explanationsthat were far from the truth,and what you remember now instead of youth.

And the workbench: joining,some wiring, donewell. On Shabbas the family.The dismissive nephew.

A black, demandingthe till in ’62,dividing time intoBefore the shvartzer held a

gun to my head andAfter. The bench, rebuiltin the utility roomof a condo in California,

eventually subsidizedby grateful tenants.The seven monthsof Ev’s leukemia.At the funeral, desperate: Gether down there before something, something … Words,always hard, nowimpossible.The daughter, marryinga cigar-faced shaygetz,whining and grasping, the son,also wordless butwithout skills or degree,never visiting. After the stroke,the photos (inthe tiny, exorbitantroom in a Home)of my wedding.In his last week,he began to talkabout being unhappy. Hisfriend, the black nurse,trying to help, kept asking“Why?” or“How unhappy are you,Carl?” But I know thisat second hand;I myself sawonly tools and the workbench –neat, gathering dustin a utility room.

Against Postmodernism

The craving remains, but luckilypaired with, countermanded byabscesses, rapesthat are not a memory; bathsfor hours, a flowered nightie, nolice, the wicker armchairon the second-floor verandah through whose screendog-walkers in the park will never see herare the memory, like obedienceto simple, remorseful commands byher mother, who drives hertwice-weekly (elegiacallyrecapturing the girl as child andthe beauty of these suburbs) toa clinic; who feels nolonger the old confusion, neverexactly guilt, abouther money or the way life has turned out,no longer drinks, and avoids,without conceptualizing, the thinly balefultalk of her friends; avoidsmost people in fact, but callsthe father regularly, who,amid lunches and meetings, remembersthe marriage, the girl; has madeplans to fly out to see her, imagineskilling the boyfriend/dealer/rapist, isglad of his rage and more controlledregret (the childless second marriage alsofailed), their long-unfelt simplicity, meanwhilepursuing whatever client overlunch or in meetings high abovethe city, where, blocksaway, the man imagined issquatting, enduring an abstract kind ofshame for sampling the product; thebitches, inherent traitors, no longermove him; he onlyleaves to rob and fix, can't re-establish cred or a market (hasbeen threatened), watchesbugs on the floor, an un-accountable curtain move, andeventually craps in a corner whilethe market he imaginedfalls to a Russian, a former zek,who recalls the split in the World of Thievesbetween the bitches who would serveand co-opt the state, and real men;regards the little blacks who runfor him, the larger whites and blacks who buy,Americans, the living generallyas soggy cardboard andthinks, in the void after a killing,of retirement: peace and illnesswhen he's old (which, though he's old,is always later), nodding toa probable Jew who waveslike a fool from the next screened-inbalcony before descending, inlong khaki shorts and long black socks(this ugly but expressive uniform,he thinks), to walk from parking lotto parking lot, smokewonderfully, illicitly, and think howhe is thinking, not merely kvetching, despiteboredom and a certainhaze around the issues, which hiswife, preparing for the Blue Plate Special,is clearer on, considering butdeferring (between calls fromor to surviving siblings) furtherinvolvement with the temple; reading,sometimes on hold toher son or doctors, booksthat have survived the moveand mildew, easier onesher friends never finish, but with mostinterest those by peoplewho lecture at the college, likethe one who sits on a bench beneathan undistinguished palm, watchingacrylic sky and seaand boats, considering butrejecting the insertion ofcommentary, a corrosiveviewpoint: subjects and objectsare beads on a string, notthe string; bright and hardand themselves, they should end, ifthey must, with the click of a clasp, not a sigh.